News

The InterRidge Office would like to highlight an Australian research cruise currently underway in the northern Lau Back-arc Basin (NLB). The SS07-2008 cruise, led by Chief Scientist Richard Arculus from Australian National University, will be in two legs from 30 April - 7 June 2008 on R/V Southern Surveyor. The objective of the first leg will be to survey the bathymetry, magnetic characteristics, petrology, hydrothermal activity, and hence origins and evolution of two of four spreading centers within this region (Northwest Lau [NWLSC] and Niuafo’ou [NSC]), which are essentially unstudied.

The InterRidge Office has just received news from a January 2008 cruise on board R/V Hakuho-maru to the Southwest Indian Ridge near the Marion hotspot. We thank Dr. Nobukazu Seama, InterRidge Steering Committee Member from Japan, for providing a summary of the cruise objectives and sampling. Please visit the InterRidge-Japan webpage for ship track and sampling locations:
http://ofgs.ori.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~intridgej/report_html/KH07-4-2/KH07-4-2.h...

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) announces the launch of its inaugural lecture series: IODP DRILLS, the Distinguished Researcher & International Leadership Lecture Series.
There are more than 30 lecture events in more than a dozen countries.
For more information and the lecture schedule: http://www.iodp.org/drills/.

FIX08: An interdisciplinary and international collaboration to study autotrophic carbon fixation and fluid chemistry at 9ºN and 13ºN EPR

An international group of scientists representing five different countries, i.e., USA, Germany, France, Italy, and China, was recently on board R/V Atlantis on cruise AT15-28, named FIX08. They were conducting work on in-situ chemistry of high- and low temperature hydrothermal vent fluids and the characterization of microbial communities carrying out autotrophic carbon fixation.